German police have long collaborated with energy giant RWE to enforce ecological catastrophe: Eviction aftermath in Lutzerath, early 2023. Lützi Lebt / flickr, CC BY-NC-SA In early 2023, the German village of Lützerath was the site of violent clashes between thousands of protesters and police who wanted to clear the village so it could be …
China makes developers pay compensation for their ecological impacts – here’s how this unique scheme works: Hanyu Qiu / shutterstock In 2017, the Chinese environmental NGO, Friends of Nature, sued the developer of a dam in Yunnan province in the country’s south west. The NGO alleged that the project’s environmental impact assessment had failed to …
Ecological doom-loops: why ecosystem collapses may occur much sooner than expected – new research: Anna Kucherova / Shutterstock Across the world, rainforests are becoming savanna or farmland, savanna is drying out and turning into desert, and icy tundra is thawing. Indeed, scientific studies have now recorded “regime shifts” like these in more than 20 different …
Shakespeare’s environmentalism: how his plays explore the same ecological issues we face today: Climate change, urban sprawl, air pollution, deforestation, depleted fish stocks, biodiversity and species loss: these are not exclusively modern problems that only sprang up in the last few hundred years. In fact, the common but misleading phrase “industrial revolution” masks the long …
Farming and fertilisers: how ecological practices can make a difference: A young farmer spreads fertiliser on young crops in Ethiopia. Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Agriculture involves a difficult balance between food production and environmental impact. For example, fertilisers can help to achieve good crop yields, but over-using them produces greenhouse gas emissions …
South Africa’s massive ‘sardine run’ leads fish into an ecological trap: Steven Benjamin/Not for reuse One of the world’s most spectacular marine migrations is the KwaZulu-Natal sardine run. The so-called “greatest shoal on Earth” takes place during the southern hemisphere’s winter. It involves the movement of tens to hundreds of millions of sardines from the …
Five shifts to decolonise ecological science – or any field of knowledge: The are massive numbers of bird species named after European surnames. Shutterstock The COVID-19 pandemic will change a lot about the way knowledge is produced, especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering and medicine. Social movements such as Black Lives Matter have …
Increasing land use could turn Mount Kilimanjaro into an ecological island: A herd of elephants walk in front of Mount Kilimanjaro in Amboseli National Park. Photo by CARL DE SOUZA/AFP via Getty Images Located in Tanzania, with a height of almost 6,000 metres, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s tallest mountain. Over the years, there’s been extensive …
South Africa’s land reform policies need to embrace social, economic and ecological sustainability: Land reform strategies portray the land as uniform, static and independent from its social-environmental context. GettyImages Land reform is central to South Africa’s quest for social justice. During the apartheid era, land was concentrated in the hands of the white minority. Black …
The new UK Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill is exactly what we need – here’s why: Matthew Dixon / shutterstock While there is debate about whether or not a second wave of the COVID-19 crisis is rolling in, the far bigger waves of the climate and ecological crisis are looming large on the horizon. For …